Several ways to target your product, even when it's a commodity
And how sheep sexuality, religious cell phones and microphones tell the same story
Hello Gobbledeers,
How’s it going? Let’s jump right in…
Today we’ll talk about:
Gay sheep and cellular service for patriots.
A bucket of Ragu
But first, two quick things:
If you enjoy Gobbledy, I would be enormously grateful if you let other people know about it. We have plateaued our subscription growth and I can’t figure out why. Because the newsletter is amazing (according to me).
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OK, that crap is out of the way.
Don we now our gay apparel
Longtime Gobbledy readers may remember that we once talked about two upstart cashmere brands - Naadam and Quince - and the weird beef (mutton?) between the two companies and how it manifested in a couple of ads.
In one, upstart Quince tried to show that their product was as good as Naadam but cost $50 instead of $125 (while also spelling “shipping” wrong in the ad).
And in another where Naadam showed two goats engaged in what usually goes on behind barn doors (while asking customers to use code GOATONGOAT to save 15% on their next purchase, though I would pay 15% extra not to have to think about goats-on-goats ever again).
OK fine, here - once again - is the ad:
Sorry about that.
I think the point I was making was that there are lots of ways to compete if you’re in a crowded market, and as I often mention, the 4 P’s you learned in your first marketing class (price, product, promotion and place) are a good little rubric for anyone who has created a new product and wants to figure out how to bring it to market. Quince cashmere decided to compete on the 1st P - price. Naadam chose to compete on the first D - disgusting advertising. Har. No, they decided to compete in part on Promotion (lets make provocative advertisements) and a Price/Product combo (a $125 sweater that’s as good as a $400 sweater).
So if you’re introducing a new cashmere brand, you’ve got some options.
Maybe if you were starting a new cashmere brand you just began considering those options, but I’m guessing you weren’t thinking of this (via Ad Age’s headline):
First let me say - I have no idea what the sexual orientation is of the goats in the Naadam ad. Or whether they’re just performing for the camera and their actual sexual orientation is something else. Plenty of gay actors have played straight roles, so I will assume the same goes for goat actors.
Maybe those aren’t goat actors at all, now that I think about it. Naadam was kind enough to obscure their identities, so maybe the image was used without those goats’ permission. I don’t know, I haven’t seen the releases.
I also have no idea how one knows the sexual orientation of a sheep. Nor do I think it matters for the sake of this discussion. The point is that a German shepherd* has launched a brand of textiles called Rainbow Wool that is meant to promote LGBTQ causes.
*To clarify:
I’m mentioning this because in software we tend to go far too broad when we’re deciding how to target our product. To wit, I saw an ad in the subway the other day for project management tool Jira that mentioned that it’s great for every project. And I was so busy thinking, “EVERY project?” that I forgot to take a picture of the ad. Oops.
But being very, very specific (“gay sheep”) in how you talk about who your product is for can be an extremely successful strategy, even if the product isn’t fundamentally different from its competition. I wanted to share a couple of quick examples of this strategy.
Let’s start small:
A friend/former co-worker (“BK”) was looking for a side hustle where he could use some of his digital marketing skills when he happened upon a little microphone that he could source from God-knows-where and try to sell using targeted ads.
The little microphone was a thing that anyone could buy from AliExpress, so the product itself wouldn’t be any different from the others out there. So he’d have to differentiate in some other way - just as the sexual orientation of the sheep doesn’t affect the product (as far I as I know, and I absolutely DO NOT know). He wanted to find a market where the buyers felt that they were under-targeted and at the same time, they had something to say (and, therefore, needed a little microphone).
Behold: The Patriot Microphone!
You can do this with any product! Isn’t Truth Social just a Patriot Microphone for Twitter users? And isn’t X just a Patriot Microphone for Twitter users?
Anyway, my boy BK wrote this wonderful bit of copy for that website that really drives the point home:
“The spirit of America is dynamic and unyielding” and “March, rally or record” belong in the landing page Hall of Fame (not a real place…yet).
So - that’s one example…take a thing that has no functionality that makes it better or worse for one group or another, and simply assign that product to one group or another.
Example 2:
If you’re not familiar with Black Rifle Coffee, it’s probably because of your hatred of America:
Black Rifle is a public company that’ll do more than $400 million in revenue this year based on the idea that you can target a product to a specific group, even if there’s no specific product feature that benefits that group.
And from what I can see, someone just asked ChatGPT for “10 ways to talk about coffee if I had just watched 300 hours of right wing livestreams and/or Sunday evening programming on Fox News” and then used that to come up with copy like this:
My favorite part is that the sale of it benefits “law enforcement officers and their families” but also it’s marked down 80 cents so I guess it will benefit them less than it used to? I’m not sure.
And also this:
You really do gotta keep that freedom engine running! Can’t disagree with that, patriots! Though I would disagree that someone in the target market would enjoy this “without the bitterness.”
So that’s how you target coffee to patriots. If anyone wants to create a coffee brand that’s targeted to the left, there’s definitely space in the market for that!
And lastly, if you’re a mobile company and you’d like to play this same game, you ALSO have two options. Well, obviously, you have many, many, many options. But here are two options:
God bless Patriot Mobile (I mean actually, God bless them) for just spelling out what they stand for - the “ONLY Christian conservative wireless provider.” Alas, given my background I cannot get Patriot Mobile. Well, I guess I COULD get them, but they’re pretty clearly Christian-focused, which is why they talk about the importance of the “Second Amendment Right to Bear Arms.”
Also, I recognize a handful of those “trusted voices of Patriot Mobile,” but not all of them - though I would imagine that if you recognize the person who I think is Sebastian Gorka but not the person on either side of Sebastian Gorka, Patriot Mobile is not for you. I’ve said before that the best marketing would be comprehensible to 100% of your target market and incomprehensible to anyone outside your target market. They’ve come pretty close.
But what if you found Patriot Mobile’s views, um, off-putting? What if you could find a mobile company that was EXACTLY THE OPPOSITE of Patriot Mobile?
Behold, Credo Mobile:
I haven’t checked, but I can’t decide if I’d be disappointed or absolutely thrilled to learn whether Patriot & CREDO Mobile(s) are owned by the same company. God, that would be amazing.
This kind of targeting makes it SO MUCH easier to decide what product to buy. If Hubspot’s marketing was “we believe life begins at 6 weeks and also in highly targeted, sequenced outreach” and Pardot’s messaging was, “it is imperative that women have the right to choose and also the right to choose the best targeted, sequenced outreach technology” it would be easier than figuring out today which of those two technologies I should buy.
Obviously what I’m saying here is that there is space in the market for a cashmere brand where the wool comes exclusively from bisexual sheep.
Rag-ewwwwwwww
That was a lot.
So I thought I’d leave you with a commercial that I’m really torn about. Every so often a pretty middle-of-the-road brand will decide that it’s time to get a little edgy in their marketing. I’m good with that. On the other hand…
I have no recollection of Ragu releasing this ad where a kid walks in on his parents having sex, followed by oddly disgusting footage of meat sauce being poured out of a jar, and then someone breaking spaghetti in half (which, I fear, is a metaphor of some sort). But now I’m making you watch it:
As always, thank you for reading to the end. If you hadn’t read to the end you wouldn’t have seen that revolting stream of Ragu getting poured. Nothing (work related) makes me happier than chatting with my readers, which is why I make it easy for you to set up 30 minutes with me just to chat about whatever you’re working on. Here’s my Calendly link.
"Obviously what I’m saying here is that there is space in the market for a cashmere brand where the wool comes exclusively from bisexual sheep."
Introducing: BISEXUWOOL
I was not prepared for the Ragu video.